Chapter Text
Time.
A lot of living beings believed time to be a loop. A cycle, a spiral, a coil - many such names were used over the years, all referring to the same thing. It was an attempt to explain the phenomenon of returning to a point in the past after death, completely unharmed. Like death, like sleep, you will wake right back up again.
Usually, such jumps were small.
Beings woke up a day - a cycle, a thread, a coil, a bit, a step - before their death, back in the same body they had at that very moment. Their physical form was already there, at that point in time, so the only thing moving was the soul. Soul, spirit, ghost, self, energy.
So many civilizations, so many words.
So many ways to call the same thing.
Fascinating, was it not?
It was rare for any living being to be brought back earlier than that - as there was no reason, after all. A single step was enough to prevent most deaths, for most beings. Why bother with going back further? Why relive more than just a day?
That was how the cycle worked.
A curse, the most recent civilization would say. Something to break. Something to solve. The Great Problem. Chains, they called it.
A blessing was what it was always meant to be.
Golden threads of time, splintered into hundreds, thousands, millions of timelines, just to give every being a chance. A blessing, to ensure that every being got to live out the life they wanted with no sudden end to a beautiful existence in sight - even if it meant destabilizing the whole world, ripping it into fragments of what it once was, spiralling further and further until it could spin no more.
After all, how many times can you split something into two before you can’t do so anymore? How many fragments will there be, before they are too fragile to exist? How many timelines could a world support? Too many, one would say. Not enough, another would say.
Everything had to come to an end eventually, before time could exist no longer.
Golden coils, like the thread, wrapped tightly around the universe, finally forced to relent. To give up. Atone, for the harm which they caused, unknowing of how their gift affected the masses.
It was never meant to look like this.
Time simply cared too much.
As a Higher Being, a Mother to all of Time, it was meant to be detached. It was never meant to care. Their sole purpose was to be a silent observer from beyond time and space, keeping everything stable. Time given form. Unfortunately, a mother could not defy their nature for long.
First, it cared for their spawn, gently guiding them with vague visions of the future, to keep them safe.
Then, it cared for simple bugs, giving them a chance to retry certain things, because it couldn’t let them die so quickly - not before reaching their full potential.
Then, it cared for even simpler creatures, wishing to see them thrive.
Then… It did not want any being to die.
It did not want them to cease their beautiful existence.
Without existence, it meant they could no longer watch them thrive - and how painful it was, to see their children, then their children’s children, then every being they ever came to love, simply perish to the unrelenting force of time.
But they were Time.
They could stop it.
So they did.
Splintering one timeline - one beautiful, long, golden-white thread - into pieces, so that no one would fully die ever again.
How was it meant to know that it was wrong?
But now it knew. Oh, it knew - the way that the beings suffered.
Knew, Knows. Will know. Didn’t, before. Time moves on, even for Higher Beings - and as much as it controlled the present, a timeline needed to happen for it to Learn. Then, it could go right back, coil in on itself, return to a previous point and try again, as many times as it took to make things right.
Now… Time was nearly gone.
Reduced into a point so fragile, that as much as they wanted to keep up, it could do so no longer.
It couldn’t fault the beings that it has blessed, of course. It couldn’t fault them for throwing themselves into the Void, the only substance which could Defy Time, to burn away their coils one by one. It brought it upon itself, and now, the only thing they could do was shatter, with millions, billions of golden threads and cracks over a pure white body, one as long as Time itself has existed for.
It needed to fix their mistakes, to atone, before their body shattered and Time itself collapsed.
Going back to the point in their body during which the thread was still stable - one, whole, not splintered into nothingness under the weight of millions, billions of different times - should not be difficult.
All it needed to do was coil once again, like it did a million times before.
And yet…
They still grew attached, despite knowing that their attachment was like poison. Despite knowing they shouldn’t. Despite feeling the sting of regret when they looked upon the beings they harmed.
Still… Their feelings remained.
It wasn’t so common for them to grow attached anymore, not after the strain of holding millions of golden threads upon their shell took its toll over them, but they could not defy the love they felt for the living for long.
Especially those few, those who reminded them of their long lost spawn.
Alien, yet familiar.
Beings made out of metal, flesh, and bones of their spawn - giving them the same scent that made the eternal mother cry out with ancient type of grief - long since repurposed, ages upon ages after the very last of their kin has perished.
Time didn’t fault them.
It was all natural, to use every part of those who came before them - especially after so long, so long, long enough that the bones became nothing more than pieces of the landscape to excavate.
Reduced from a corpse, a grave, to a simple material to use.
That was how Time worked. To every being in the world.
They shouldn’t treat them differently for that.
Unfortunately, they did. The scent, and curiosity, and grief, all of it made them see those beings as, in part, their own children.
Children, raised from the dead, like an animated corpse. Were they truly?
Were there any parts of the lost spawn’s souls in the bodies of those beings, they wondered?
They were different.
They were no longer attached to what made up their shell.
No, those old souls were gone - and the beings were new, like how a lizard holds no attachments to the prey it has eaten that allowed their body to grow.
This knowledge didn’t remove the ancient sort of care that Time felt.
They didn’t deserve this existence.
Perhaps it could fix this, too, in their quest to atone.
Carefully weaving the golden threads of time together, pulling away those who mattered the most, right at the end of the world, at the end of time. A cruel existence, to be locked away within a structure of metal and bone, right until the very end.
It did not fault them for trying to destroy their blessing - it was what their parents expected of them, after all. How could a Mother be so cruel, to not see what was truly there? Children, willing to do anything to make their parents proud?
It reminded them of a time long ago. Ages upon ages before Time turned into fragments.
A mistake once done.
A mistake repeated a hundred times.
Perhaps… They could fix two things at once.
Aid their now-dead spawn, coiling back to when they were still alive, and help their not-spawn live a life they deserved.
Yes, that would be good.
With the broken threads held between strange twisted claws, Time coiled back on its extended body, looking over the past written ages upon ages ago. A single thread.
No more blessings. No more curses.
No more suffering from an endless life.
A single blade raised above the coiling body, above a point back when everything seemed alright.
All it needed to do was remove the future. Sever the coils. Erase it all.
I’m sorry, my children. May your next existence be kinder to you.
So it did.
Severed.
Cut off.
Gone.
Back to the beginning, yet changed.
Hopefully… It was enough.
Good luck, my not-children.